People

When the effervescent Wolfgang Puck visits Spago, his signature restaurant in Beverly Hills, he often stops by each table to greet fans of his innovative "fusion" cuisine, which blends cooking styles and ingredients from various parts of the world.

Steve Taylor, the new president of Boeing Business Jets, grew up around airplanes. "My first airplane ride was in an Aero Commander at age a-month-and-a-half and I have kind of been in them ever since," he told me. "I was a kid who read airplane magazines front to back-your basic airplane geek."

F. Lee Bailey argued his way into the American consciousness, having directed the defense at many of the most talked-about criminal trials of the last half century. He represented Albert DeSalvo, the so-called Boston Strangler, as well as Dr. Sam Sheppard, the man widely believed to be the inspiration for the TV series The Fugitive.

Listen to Suze Orman's entire interview with Business Jet Traveler's Jeff Burger, as recorded at the CNBC studio in New Jersey. The audio file includes considerable material that we didn't have room for in the published article.

Though Suze Orman proclaims her whole life "fabulous," her early years bore little resemblance to the world she inhabits now. In Berkeley, Calif., when she was in her 20s, she slept in her Ford Econoline van for two months while working for a tree service. Then she spent six years as a waitress, earning about $400 a month.

When Chip Ganassi was five, his father gave him and his cousins a number of go-karts he had confiscated from the owner of a go-kart track who had failed to pay his bill after the elder Ganassi had paved the track. That early experience led the young Ganassi to high school dirt-bike motocross contests, motorcycle racing and, eventually, professional auto racing.

Richard Thompson is an enthusiastic self-proclaimed entrepreneur. "I've never had a job my whole life that I didn't create," he told me as we talked in his finely refurbished Hawker 700A on the Jet Aviation ramp at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport.

In 1999, when Kenny Dichter took his first private jet ride on a friend's Hawker 800XP from New York to Boston, the airplane wasn't all that took wing. Dichter spotted an untapped market. Less than a decade later, he helms a jet-card subsidiary to industry giant NetJets that had sales of approximately $800 million to $900 million last year.

Quote/Unquote

“[New billionaires in fast-growing countries] have to buy longer-range airplanes. If you’re flying from Mongolia to Nigeria, it’s either a three-day journey flying commercial or a nine-hour flight on your jet.”